Noticing Jon Stewart

NY Times -- On the day of Baghdad's liberation, Mr. Stewart told his viewers that "if you are incapable of feeling at least a tiny amount of joy at watching ordinary Iraqis celebrate this, you are lost to the ideological left." Then he added: "If you are incapable of feeling badly that we even had to use force in the first place, you are ideologically lost to the right." He implored "both of those groups to leave the room now." That would still leave a vast audience.

"One thing is certain: If Saddam is dead, it greatly reduces his ability to control Iraq." But wouldn't his death end his control entirely? asked Mr. Stewart. Not necessarily, argued Mr. Colbert: "When this man appears in public no one is sure it's actually him, and yet he's held an iron grip on power since 1979 — 24 years of brutal dictatorship, all while only maybe existing. The point is we can kill Saddam Hussein but we won't win the war until we kill the idea of Saddam Hussein. So what we need to do is develop bombs that kill ideas."

"It's so interesting to me that people talk about late-night comedy being cynical," Mr. Stewart says. "What's more cynical than forming an ideological news network like Fox and calling it `fair and balanced'? What we do, I almost think, is adorable in its idealism. It's quaint."